Spline Path Following for Redundant Mechanical Systems
This addresses path following for redundant mechanical systems, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing control design methods.
The paper tackled the problem of path following control for kinematically redundant mechanical systems using spline-generated curves, including self-intersecting ones, and experimentally verified the approach on a 4-DOF manipulator with model uncertainty.
Path following controllers make the output of a control system approach and traverse a pre-specified path with no apriori time parametrization. In this paper we present a method for path following control design applicable to framed curves generated by splines in the workspace of kinematically redundant mechanical systems. The class of admissible paths includes self-intersecting curves. Kinematic redundancies are resolved by designing controllers that solve a suitably defined constrained quadratic optimization problem. By employing partial feedback linearization, the proposed path following controllers have a clear physical meaning. The approach is experimentally verified on a 4-degree-of-freedom (4-DOF) manipulator with a combination of revolute and linear actuated links and significant model uncertainty.